Fewer Than 10,000 Sainted Souls

We're just piling on now, we know. From today's Wall Street Journal:

Mobile ESPN's model doesn't appear to be winning over consumers. The start-up, which was launched in February, had signed up fewer than 10,000 customers through May, according to people familiar with the situation. Robert Iger, Disney's chief executive, said on the company's first-quarter earnings conference call that initial sales from Mobile ESPN were "lower than hoped."

Just to give you an idea of how few 10,000 customers are for a venture that featured major advertising during the Super Bowl and, obviously, on ESPN every minute of every day, 10,000 people is:

• Smaller than our hometown of Mattoon, Illinois. • Fewer than the number of people who visit this site in an average afternoon hour. • More than half as many people who attended this Devil Rays-Royals game in Kansas City. • Fewer than the number of people who saw noted summer movie flop Poseidon in its first three hours.

So yeah. It has really gone well.

Cellphone Start-Ups Struggle As Media Services Fail To Catch On [Wall Street Journal] What's $25 Million Between Friends? [Deadspin]

(By the way, anybody else get the Trey Wingo direct mail piece about the phone? We did, and we kind of assumed everybody did.)